New Books in British Studies

The Enlightenment is often either praised as the wellspring of modern egalitarianism or condemned as the cradle of scientific racism. How should we make sense of this paradox? The Color of Equality: Race and Common Humanity in Enlightenment Thought (U Pennsylvania Press, 2021) is the first book to investigate both the inclusive language of common humanity and the hierarchical language of race in Enlightenment thought, seeking to understand how eighteenth-century thinkers themselves made sense of these tensions. Using three major Enlightenment encyclopedias from England, France, and Switzerland, the book provides a rich contextualization of the conflicting ideas of equality and race in eighteenth-century thought.Enlightenment thinkers used physical features to categorize humanity into novel "racial" groups in a discourse that was imbued with Eurocentric aesthetic and moral judgments. Simultaneously, however, these very same thinkers politicized equality by putting it to new uses, such as a vitriolic denunciation of slavery and inhumane treatment that was grounded in the nascent philosophy of human rights. Vartija contends that the tension between Enlightenment ideas of race and equality can best be explained by these thinkers' attempt to provide a naturalistic account of humanity, including both our physical and moral attributes. Enlightenment racial classification fits into the novel inclusion of humanity in histories of nature, while the search for the origins of morality in social experience alone lent equality a normative authority it had not previously possessed.Eschewing straightforward approbation or blame of the Enlightenment, The Color of Equality demonstrates that our present-day thinking about human physical and cultural diversity continues to be deeply informed by an eighteenth-century European intellectual revolution with global ramifications.Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is Lecturer in Digital History and Culture at the University of Portsmouth. She tweets at @timetravelallie. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

More than one million Indian soldiers were deployed during World War I, serving in the Indian army as part of Britain's imperial war effort. These men fought in France and Belgium, Egypt and East Africa, and at Gallipoli, in Palestine, and in Mesopotamia. While Indian contributions to the war have long been recognized (unlike other colonial contributions), it has long been disparaged and lacked significant scholarly attention, especially in the western academy.In Indian Soldiers in World War I: Race and Representation in an Imperial War (University of Nebraska Press, 2021), Andrew T. Jarboe reconstructs the Indian experience of the war, examining the contested representations that British and Indian audiences drew from the soldiers' wartime experiences and the impacts these representations had on the British Empire's racial politics. Presenting overlooked or forgotten connections, Jarboe argues that Indian participation contributed decisively to the war effort. At the same time, Indian participation in the war led to a hardening of the British Empire's prewar racist ideologies and governing policies, and did not result in advancement toward Indian national aspirations or improvements in racial equality. When Indian soldiers participated in the brutal suppression of anti-government demonstrations in India at war's end, they set the stage for the eventual end of British rule in south Asia.Indian Soldiers in World War I will interest readers with an interest in World War I, imperial history, South Asian history, and is an important contribution to a growing field of scholarship about the contributions of colonial subjects to the war effort--and how broken promises made during the war continue to have ramifications long after decolonization.Christopher S. Rose is a social historian of medicine focusing on Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and 20th century. He currently teaches History at St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas and Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Following upon the success of his magisterial account of Winston Churchill, Andrew Roberts returns with an outstanding biography of George III: The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III (Viking, 2021) . Drawing on important new archival material, Roberts rescues George III from unwarranted criticism and dramatic hyperbole to show how this "enlightenment prince" engaged with the key issues that shaped the British world in the middle and later eighteenth century - from his rejection of slavery to his appreciation of science and the arts. Developing a new account of the rebellion of the thirteen colonies, Roberts argues that "America's last king" was already the guarantor of their freedom. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Today Crawford Gribben joins us to talk about his new book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland (Oxford UP, 2021). Ireland has long been regarded as a 'land of saints and scholars'. Yet the Irish experience of Christianity has never been simple or uncomplicated. The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland describes the emergence, long dominance, sudden division, and recent decline of Ireland's most important religion, as a way of telling the history of the island and its peoples.Throughout its long history, Christianity in Ireland has lurched from crisis to crisis. Surviving the hostility of earlier religious cultures and the depredations of Vikings, evolving in the face of Gregorian reformation in the 11th and 12th centuries and more radical protestant renewal from the 16th century, Christianity has shaped in foundational ways how the Irish have understood themselves and their place in the world. And the Irish have shaped Christianity, too. Their churches have staffed some of the religion's most important institutions and developed some of its most popular ideas.But the Irish church, like the island, is divided. After 1922, a border marked out two jurisdictions with competing religious politics. The southern state turned to the Catholic church to shape its social mores, until it emerged from an experience of sudden-onset secularization to become one of the most progressive nations in Europe. The northern state moved more slowly beyond the protestant culture of its principal institutions, but in a similar direction of travel.In 2021, fifteen hundred years on from the birth of Saint Columba, Christian Ireland appears to be vanishing. But its critics need not relax any more than believers ought to despair. After the failure of several varieties of religious nationalism, what looks like irredeemable failure might actually be a second chance. In the ruins of the church, new Columbas and Patricks shape the rise of another Christian Ireland.Jana Byars is the Academic Director of Netherlands: International Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Jeremy Black, who recently retired as professor of history of Exeter University, has just published the two latest installments of his series of works on writers of literary fiction. England in the Age of Dickens, 1812-70 (Amberley, 2022) is an outstanding discussion of the worlds in which the most famous "Victorian novelist" engaged - even as it questions that reputation by reminding us that Dickens was often writing about an older England. In The Importance of Being Poirot (St Augustine's Press, 2021), Black turns his attention to Agatha Christie, showing how she sustained the moral framework that drove her detective fiction even as the world changed, sometimes in fundamental ways, around her. Crawford Gribben is a professor of history at Queen’s University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

In 1850 Charles Dickens wrote that Great Britain had “no political police,” adding that “the most rabid demagogue” could speak out “without the terror of an organised spy system.” In his book State Surveillance, Political Policing, and Counter-Terrorism in Britain: 1880-1914 (Boydell Press, 2021), Vlad Solomon describes how Britain gradually developed a system of “high policing” during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras that contradicted Britons’ popular belief in their tolerant society. As Solomon demonstrates, contrary to Dickens’s blithe assurance, Britain had irregularly employed political policing prior to the 1880s. The threat posed by Fenian terrorism, however, compelled the British home secretary, William Harcourt, to create a specialized section of the London Metropolitan Police in response. This evolved into Special Branch, which subsequently found its remit expanded to include monitoring political radicals, aliens, and even militant suffragists. Yet despite their increased range of duties, the number of detectives assigned to such tasks remained limited until espionage concerns and the prospect of war prompted the government to overhaul political policing with the creation of a new agency – the future MI5 – in order to provide more effective monitoring of the political threats facing the country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Covering the period from the interwar years through the arrival of the steamship SS Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948 and culminating in the period of decolonization in the British Caribbean by the early 1970s, James Cantres’ Blackening Britain: Caribbean Radicalism from Windrush to Decolonization (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) situates the development of networks of communication, categories of identification, and Caribbean radical politics both in the metropole and abroad. Cantres explores how articulations of Caribbean identity formation corresponded to the following themes: organic collective action, political mobilization, cultural expressions of shared consciousness, and novel patterns of communication. Blackening Britain shows how colonial migrants developed tools of resistance in the imperial center predicated on their racialized consciousness that emerged from their experiences of alienation and discrimination in Britain.Blackening Britain interrogates the ways in which prominent West Indian activists, intellectuals, political actors, and artists conceived of their relationship to Britain. Ultimately, this work shows a move away from British identity and a radical, revolutionary consciousness rooted in the West Indian background and forged in the contentious space of metropolitan Britain.Purchase a copy of Blackening Britain: From Windrush to Decolonization through January 8, 2022, using the Promo code: 21JOYSALE for 35% off at Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.Amanda Joyce Hall is a Ph.D. Candidate in History and African American Studies at Yale University. She is writing an international history on the Black-led grassroots movement against South African apartheid during the 1970s and 1980s. She tweets from @amandajoycehall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

With the opening of the Suez Canal, larger and faster steamships, plus dockside engineering to accommodate them – time shrunk in the British Empire. The movement of bodies between the U.K and colonial outposts quickened. In Kristen D. Hussey’s Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880-1914 (U Pittsburgh Press, 2021), readers are introduced to how such mobility transformed British conceptions of health and illness and the medical practices to heal. A scramble for “imperial bodies” occurred as medical professionals sought to cure the Empire’s “tropical” diseases.Hussey’s intense archival work delivers several case studies in British medicine that brings together various historical narratives. Merging spatial theories to the history of medicine, for example, Hussey communicates well the reciprocal nature of Empire, movement, and diseased bodies. London loomed large as a place of recuperation, a place to get well, and the best that medicine had to offer. Imperial Bodies in London reads as if a microhistory, but never deviates from connecting to larger, much broader sweep of history. The story of how European men and women – administrators, soldiers, sailors, missionaries, doctors, servants, and families – returned home to recover or readjust from their imperial duties and thereby became specimens (in a sense) to advance medical knowledge is deftly handled by the author.In this interview, discussed are ways in which British medical practitioners approached diseases affecting the liver, eyes, brain and blood of those that served the Empire. Many of their discoveries and practices were the foundations of modern medicine. The current Covid-19 pandemic makes this book not only timely, but a terrific read into the origins of modern medicine.Joseph Krulder is a historian of Britain's long eighteenth-century: cultural, social, military, and economic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The Second Battle of El-Alamein, alongside Stalingrad and Midway, is taught in schools the world over as one of the turning points of the Second World War—or, depending on who you talk to, the turning point.But what led to that battle? How did Rommel’s army push so far across North Africa? And why, perchance, did he push one time too many? What were those in Egypt and the Middle East—and not just their British overseers, thinking about the coming invasion.War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis from the Middle East (PublicAffairs: 2021), written by Gershom Gorenberg, tells the story leading to the British Army holding off the Nazis at El Alamein: a battle not just of soldiers and tanks, but spies and codebreakers.In this interview, Gershom and I talk about the years preceding the Battle for Egypt: those who broke Enigma, the spies who unlocked their enemies secrets, and the troubled relations between nominal allies. Gershom Gorenberg’s previous books are The Unmaking of Israel (HarperCollins: 2011), The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (Macmillan: 2007), and The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford University Press: 2002). He also co-authored The Jerusalem Report’s 1996 biography of Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Friend, winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Gershom is a columnist for The Washington Post, and has written for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and in Hebrew for Ha’aretz. He can be followed on Twitter at @GershomGYou can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of War of Shadows. Follow on Facebook or on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

What have the Romans ever done for us? That’s the question put to his pals by Reg, in a much quoted scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian. The debate is notionally about imperial oppression of Judea, but the assembled radicals ultimately agree that, in fact, the Romans were the bringers of sanitation, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health. In other words, they got things done. In his new book, A Useful History of Britain: The Politics of Getting Things Done (Oxford UP, 2021), Michael Braddick explores the Romans and the peoples who succeeded them on Britain from the vantage point of the politics of getting things done. It is a concise but wide ranging book, which localises global history by focussing on agency – the power to do things. In a historical field dominated by attention to power, rulers and parliaments, this book insists on a shift in perspective and makes a convincing case for history as a resource for meeting the future, rather than a source of comfort and national group think.Charles Prior is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Hull, where he co-leads the Treatied Spaces Research Group. His latest publication is Settlers in Indian Country. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies